In the “really big 3D Show,” a 3-D cartoon at the Chocolate World visitors’ center in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a despotic film producer hijacks a lecture about the life of Milton Hershey—founder of the town and its eponymous chocolate company and amusement park—proposes different boilerplate movie concepts (an action picture, then a romance, and finally a cast-of-thousands-of-dancine-chocolate-hars musical) to spice up the history he finds so drab.

The candy bar as we know it was born in America. So too, many centuries earlier, was chocolate itself. Mexican natives cultivated the cocoa bean for more than twenty-five hundred years before Hernán Cortés took it to Spain with him in 1528. Spanish royalty drank a cold, sweetened beverage made from the beans, but they liked it so much they kept it a secret from the rest of Europe for the remainder of the century. Not until the 1840s did a British firm, Fry and Sons, make the first chocolate bar.Read more »

Milton Snavely Hershey, the chocolate man, was talking to an old friend some forty years ago about the strange, artificial, moneymaking town that he had started from scratch, and named for himself, back at the turn of the century: “We haven’t any politics, and our employes don’t have to live here if they don’t want to.”